altered pc world logo

A customer recently came to me after an unhelpful, incorrect and ultimately expensive experience at PC World.

Their Dell Inspiron laptop had stopped working, after initially refusing to look at it, the ‘tech’ person grudgingly agreed after a complaint to his manager. After being told it was thought the power supply had stopped working, he took it away and ultimately concluded the motherboard needed replacing.

Of course it didn’t and just needed another power supply which was less than £20.00 for a recycled one on eBay!

Unfortunately the customer had already bought another laptop on this expert’s advice which she didn’t need. Please don’t go to PC World for advice!

Just recently I’d been asked to repair what seems to be a common problem with PC type laptops over a couple of years old. Dust gets trapped in the copper fins and the fan of the CPU heatsink and reduces the efficiency of the cooling resulting in regular power off’s by the laptop as it gets over it’s upper temperature setting.

The fix is relatively easy, remove the heatsink unit, blow it clean with compressed air, clean the old CPU heatsink paste off with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and spread a thin but even film of good quality heatsink paste on the CPU. Put it all back together, keep your fingers crossed and it should be fine!

This has fixed several laptops permanently and with this Advent I could go ahead and wipe the old Windows XP Home from it and install Ubuntu 8.04 that’s fantastic and  installs perfectly without any ‘geeking around’ necessary. My only problem is the fan control from linux, but that’s another story……